What Makes Writing Great? (Ep. 1)

In this first full episode, I ask a deceptively simple question: what is great writing? If you’re like me, great writing is something you recognize on an intuitive level, but when you try to articulate what makes that writing great, things get . . . complicated. 

In this episode, I offer a way of thinking about great writing that cuts across genre and style—a simple framework, both descriptive and prescriptive, for naming what sits at the heart of every truly great work of literature.

Mentioned in this episode:

• “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins
• The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (paraphrase from Chapter 7)
• Thomas Merton’s discussion of “the false self” in Chapter 2 of New Seeds of Contemplation

>>Sign up for Unearthing Beauty: Memoir Edition. Doors close April 2 or when all seats are filled! Have questions about the program? Shoot me an email at mara @ maraeller.com and I'll help you determine whether it's a good fit!

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Transcript

1:10

Welcome to the Soul and Science of Great Writing. I'm your host, Mara Eller, freelance editor, book coach, and writing teacher with over 16 years of experience. I'm obsessed with the transformative power of words and with understanding what makes writing truly exceptional, not just to help my clients, but to grow my own craft too. So what makes writing truly great? Is it the spark of inspiration, the unique voice the intangible soul that breathes life into words? Or is it the careful structure, repeatable strategies, and attention to detail that turn an idea into something readers can't put down. In truth, it's both. The soul and science of great writing brings creativity and craft together, dissecting and reveling in the power of language. Because great writing isn't just about technique. It's also about that human spark that can't be taught only nurtured. On this podcast, we explore the soul and the science with equal parts, awe and analysis. You'll hear solo deep dives, conversations with authors, editors and publishing professionals, and the occasional dip into literary and pop culture analysis to spark fresh insight. We'll talk about the habits, strategies, and mindsets that help writers grow their creative craft and the challenges every writer faces along the way, whether you're a writer honing your craft, or a language lover looking for fun and inspiration, you're in the right place. I can't wait to dive in with you. We will be talking about plenty of practical tools and techniques in future episodes, but first, it's important to get clear about what we mean when we say great writing. Whether you're here to appreciate it more deeply, or to learn how to produce it yourself, we need a shared sense of what it is. Put another way before we set off on this adventure through the wilds of the written word. We should clarify where we're trying to go. If you're like me, great writing is something you recognize on an intuitive level, something you feel in your bones, but when we try to articulate what makes that writing great, to name the characteristics that set it apart, things get complicated. Sure. I could give you a list of technical qualities that I look for when I'm editing, but that would quickly bring up questions of genre and style. What I'm after here is something more universal. We might be tempted to jump to popularity or critical acclaim as markers of great writing, but while quantitative indicators like five star ratings received, units sold, or even awards won, can and often do correlate with quality, we've all had the experience of opening a widely celebrated book and finding ourselves slogging through word soup. So how can we distinguish great writing from mediocre? Or is it purely subjective? Preferences can vary widely, but if you're here listening, I suspect that like me, you believe there are some qualities that transcend personal taste that allow us to say with some confidence, this is better. This is great writing. Of course there are dozens, probably hundreds of elements at work in any great piece of writing that we can isolate, analyze, and imitate. But in my experience, when writing truly feels great, two qualities are always present. In this first episode, I want to offer a way of thinking about great writing that cuts across genre and style, a simple framework, both descriptive and prescriptive for what sits at the heart of every truly great work of literature. Let's begin. More than anything else, it's language that makes us unique as a species, particularly written language and what it allows us to do, according to Judeo Christian scriptures, God spoke the world into existence. God said, let there be light, and there was light. Whether or not you believe that, literally, I think we can all sense that words have power. Power to create and to destroy the stories. We believe that we tell ourselves about. Our lives become our reality through narrative. We create meaning weaving facts into true fictions. And this is happening every hour, every second without our even being aware of it. We are meaning making machines and words are what carry that meaning into the world. Words also connect us to one another, creating bonds based on shared narratives. What else is a relationship? But the sense that your stories are intertwined. The written word is particularly unique. many intelligent animal species communicate, but humans are the only ones that write. Writing allows us to turn the transience of speech into something immortal, something that transcends time. And in recent centuries, space crossing any distance, bringing two people, writer and reader, face to face. Writing is at its core communication, or reaching out across the Gulf between two souls. It's the author saying, here I am. This is my experience. This is the meaning I've made out of the mess and madness of life. Maybe it will help you at the deepest level. Writing says, you are not alone. There is hope. the act of writing is inherently hopeful. It presumes that someone will be there to read it, that there is something worth recording, that someone might find it meaningful. Even journaling privately implies a hope that the act of writing is itself transformative and it is. Research shows that writing expressively about your thoughts and feelings, just 20 minutes a day for four days in a row led to a 50% improvement in immune response, and a measurable improvement in mood writing also helps us make sense of our life experiences to find out what we think, as Stephen King says, and to form coherent narratives that allow us to heal from trauma. Even if no one else ever reads it, writing is an incredibly powerful practice, but most writing is, I believe, intended to be shared. It's a form of communication, A process that isn't complete until it reaches a reader. And while all writing is inherently valuable, some writing is undoubtedly more effective than others. So what makes writing great at the micro level? It depends on. So many things, purpose, audience, genre, and so on. but after almost 17 years of teaching, writing and editing professionally, plus almost 40 of reading. Avidly, I think great writing across genre and style is characterized by two things. First, great writing is true. I don't mean factual. I mean that it attempts to say something deeply honest to communicate, a truth discovered, or at least confirmed through experience and tested by time. In this sense, great writing is always a self revelation, even when the subject is not the self. Second, great writing is transformative. It seeks to portray and initiate or encourage transformation. Transformation is at the heart of every story. The main character grows or sometimes devolves in a cautionary tale. In some way as a result of the events of the story, prescriptive books like personal development, self-help and so on are overtly aimed at transformation for the reader. But even with something like poetry, which might be neither a story nor a prescription, but merely description. When it is done well, it will leave the reader a little bit different than she was before, And writing done well is always transformative for the writer. I tell my clients, if you're not at least a little different after you finish an essay or an article or a book, then you were when you started. You're doing it wrong. Writing something deeply true changes you and reading it changes the reader. This is perhaps getting at the heart of why any of us writes or reads. We want to understand the world a little more clearly, to see it more truly, and we want to be changed by that. Seeing to feel, think, or even behave differently as a result, and literature in the broadest sense, is a powerful path to both understanding and change. Truth and transformation. Well, what about beauty? You might be asking. What about meaning? Simple enjoyment? Aren't those reasons we write and read too? Of course they are. But beauty and meaning are not the starting point of great writing. They are a result. They emerge when a writer is committed to truth and willing to follow it wherever it leads. And when that truth carries the potential for transformation. And what about the pleasure of reading something, engaging, absorbing, even delightful? Yes. The simple enjoyment that can come with reading certain great texts shouldn't be dismissed. But such enjoyment alone gives us entertainment, not literature. Great writing is not just entertaining, it's engaging. It may delight us, transport us, or indulge our imagination, but without truth and transformation at the core of the project, it will never be more than good. Great writing on the other hand, is always guided by those deeper, less ephemeral aims. It seeks not, or not only to please, but to reveal not only to delight, but to change. Entertainment comes as a side effect. Keep in mind here that the reader transformation can often be enhanced by entertaining style or content. So in the pursuit of transformation, you might share a hilarious story or weave in some cringe-worthy puns or spend weeks improving the tension and pacing in your novel. But it's always in service of the deeper goal. Of course, most readers won't notice any of this, at least not consciously great writing like any art is something we recognize on an intuitive level. We know it when we see it, but when asked what's so great about it, most of us find it very hard to put into words, and that's okay. As Billy Collins' wonderful poem titled Introduction to Poetry Reminds Us Analysis is in many ways the best way to kill a work of art or to destroy our opportunity to experience it fully and authentically, which is the point despite what all those English classes might have led you to believe. The point of literature is not to eviscerate each text and study its innards under a microscope. The point is to soak in the experience each offers to immerse yourself in the author's perspective, to soar on the wings of an eagle or sink under the weight of the American Dream, as with Tenons the Eagle and Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby, respectively. We soar or sink momentarily, and then rise to the surface of our own lives again with renewed appreciation or resolve. Nevertheless, analysis does offer its own treasures. It can teach us to read more closely, and it can help us learn to produce great writing of our own. Just as a painter must study various techniques. But ultimately moves beyond them, incorporating them into the instinctive craftsmanship that characterizes a master. Ultimately, great writing transcends craft. It's more than the sum of its parts, more than an amalgamation of techniques. We all know the disappointment of, for example, listening to a technically perfect rendition of a favorite musical piece that lacks that something. That humanness that makes it come alive. It has no soul, and so it can never be truly great. AI only makes this more obvious greatness. The way we're defining it here is not about perfection. In fact, imperfections, intentional and in service of the truth are part of what makes great writing great. They're what give its soul. but we mustn't equate soul with imperfection. Rather, it goes back to that higher principle of truth, which is inherently spiritual. It's a connection with the divine, with capital T, truth, a glimpse through the veil that limits our perspective in this fallen world. A flash of something brighter, clearer, deeper, truer. as readers We experience it as being taken momentarily beyond ourselves, let or sometimes pushed beyond what we'd formally considered the limit of our reality, an encounter with the great beyond. This might sound dramatic. Sometimes it feels dramatic. Other times it's much more subtle. But the difference in intensity is not to be confused with a difference in substance, the same spirit that animates a life-changing book, infuses the single sentence that captures your attention and glitters there in your memory long after reading it. We can no more force this aspect of greatness into our writing than we can capture the wind, but we can invite it. We can open ourselves to it. Prepare the soil for its arrival, nurture the seed when it begins to sprout. Just as the intelligent farmer uses the advantages of science to create ideal growing conditions, but cannot create the spark of life that transforms a seed into a fruiting tree. So two must we learn and apply the science of great writing while still making room for the ineffable, animating spirit to infuse our words with life, to give them a soul, not just a body. And in so doing, we expose our own souls to profound transformation. Great writing always requires vulnerability on the part of the writer. It is the prerequisite for truth. The writer must be willing to split herself open to expose herself yes to public scrutiny. But more profoundly to that purifying fire of truth that makes the threat of public disapproval seem trivial in comparison. To paraphrase Annie Dillard's metaphor in the writing life, the writer must with her pen prick, the pulsing flesh of her heart until the blood runs, and then follow it wherever it leads. Or to use a Jungian analogy, the writer must descend deep into the subterranean caves of her own psyche to face, and ultimately befriend the monster that she discovers there. One who has done that no longer fears the opinions of others. They may still sting, of course, but they do not pierce past the skin. This is not to say that all great writing is explicitly autobiographical. Great writing exists and is possible in every genre, from memoir to fantasy to self-help rather. The kind of self exposure I'm describing here is part of the creative process, no matter the genre. If great writing results, the writer has gone through that experience of laying bare for this reason. The pursuit of producing truly great writing is not for the faint of heart. It requires courage and it requires commitment. It is not the goal of an hour or a week or even a year. It is the dream of a lifetime. It does not come cheap, though it can in some ways, at some moments come easy. It requires nothing less than the full surrender of what Thomas Merton calls your false self. That mask we all wear in a misguided attempt at self-protection. Writing of the sort we're discussing is one of the surest ways to melt away that facade and reveal the true self beneath by seeking truth. Great writing leads us to transformation, revealing new layers of beauty and meaning, bringing our souls more into alignment. With the great author of Creation, it weaves an infinite web of interconnection. Writer to reader. Reader to reader, both to the ultimate source of truth, transcending time and space to form an unbreakable bond. It is a noble calling, but the giggly practice is rarely glamorous. More often, it's tedious, painstaking, confounding, humbling. Perhaps that's always the case for any endeavor that enables us to glimpse the divine. It takes hard work to bend our stubborn earthly forms into our receptive posture, but writing is not all drudgery. Sometimes we fall into flow hours slipping away like minutes, or we see the quality of our pros improving and swell with the quiet satisfaction of growth. And then there are those rare moments of magic that make it all worth it. The thrill of recognition when something truly transformative emerges on the page, surprising us with a brilliance we scarcely dared hope for. If you've been writing or creating in any medium for a significant length of time, you've surely seen it, the turn of phrase that says More than you had intended. The pattern of light and color that evokes an association you hadn't considered the seemingly random word choice that turns an object into a symbol and cracks open deeper layers of meaning. Each is a moment of alchemy, transmission, transcendence, when something greater takes over, and all you can do is allow it and give thanks. Great writing then is the result of something ineffable, something that cannot be forced or manufactured, and yet we are responsible for the conditions that make room for that transcendent truth and that carry it intact from one person to another. So how do we do that? How do we cultivate the conditions for greatness without smothering the creative spark? Or for many of us already bowed under the weight of productivity culture's, fear-based motivation. How do we practice discipline while also reclaiming space for inspiration? That question how creativity and craft mystery and discipline come together to produce life-changing writing is what this podcast is all about. I'm so glad you're joining me for the journey. While this episode leaned philosophical, rest assured you'll find plenty of practical tools, techniques, and strategies and future episodes, but I felt it was important to begin this project, this podcast, with a shared understanding of what we mean by great writing. For much of my teaching career, I focused primarily on the science of writing, how to be more concise, clear, compelling, and correct. But ultimately, none of that matters if you're not saying something meaningful, something true, something transformative. Earlier in my life, I swung hard in the opposite direction and I treated rules and formulas as enemies of true creativity. Over time though I've come to see that craft and creativity are not adversaries at all. They work in tandem in a kind of symbiosis, and I've come to see that such balance, such interplay is at the heart of all great writing. Ultimately, great writing requires both soul intuition, vulnerability, transcendence, and science analysis, structure and technique. The next two episodes will dive deeper into each of those components. In turn, exploring how each is essential and yet on its own, insufficient for creating writing that resonates, transforms and endures. That wraps up today's episode of The Soul and Science of Great Writing. If you found this helpful, be sure to check out the links in the show notes and to follow or subscribe in your favorite podcast app. And could you do me a favor? If you enjoyed this episode, take an extra minute to rate and review the show. This will help others find it and will also make my day. I will be back next Wednesday with our next episode, taking you deeper into the transformative power of writing. Until then, remember, words are more than ink on a page. They're a path to wholeness.